Dixon: Legislature lurches into the dark

Published 7:50 pm, Friday, May 9, 2014

Some people call the 13-week General Assembly session that ended in a midnight flurry, or slurry, of bills a sprint.

It was more like a marathon wallow.

By the time the House and Senate began to pass some legislation, around April 21, it was really too late for the Democrats to take advantage of their sheer numbers: 96-54 in the House, 22-14 in the Senate.

It's not that I think it's a good thing for Democrats to always work their will. I'm an underdog fan, so when the House Republicans put up that little yellow stick'em note singling prolonged debate, I lean back and kind of enjoy what can only be called the "process" of working the clock for a few hours.

These filibusters-without-portfolio would allow most rank-and-filers to exit the chamber and stroll out to one kind of legislative reception or another.

In the waning days of the session, you can depend on the Distilled Spirits folks to help lubricate what is generally a drab and dour crowd of egomaniacs. The next night, it was the beer distributors' reception, easing lawmakers into that good night on the Capitol's first floor.

My favorite, in theory since I never actually go into these events, is the Connecticut Anesthesiologists annual reception. I have poked my head into that one. Alas, there are no board-certified doctors filling balloons with nitrous oxide for laughing lawmakers.

Since Dan -- yes he's back to "Dan" now that he's up for re-election -- Malloy took office in 2010, Democrats have had the hammer, breaking 20 years of Republican occupancy of the Governor's Residence.

Sure, Lowell Weicker was an independent by the time he ran for governor in 1990, but the lead sentence of his obituary will surely remember him as the Republican U.S. senator who showed Richard Nixon the door to resignation and the departing presidential helicopter.

So Malloy beats Greenwich millionaire Tom Foley by 6,404 votes and Democrats get control of the executive branch to go with the legislative. Facing a $3.2-billion deficit or more, Malloy and his fellow Democrats -- many of whom he can't call buddies -- raise taxes by $2.8 billion over the first two-year cycle.

When they gathered in February for the three-month-plus mid-term budget adjustment session, Malloy thought they had a hefty $500-million surplus, so they could afford some voter friendly items, such as the $55 a head "refund" on sales and gas taxes. By April 28, as Republicans began to work their minority-guerrilla actions in the House and Senate, Malloy's plans came to a screeching halt, as the surplus all but disappeared.

Now, in the budget passed last week, the shadow of the surplus, $43.4 million, gets folded into the emergency reserves. The good news is the election year pandering is over. Maybe better news is that during this past week, the state came as close to a two-party system as it can.

Republicans made it quite plain that they would stop the process of hundreds of bills. Not dozens, hundreds, by simply waving the yellow stick'em paper.

In fact, heading into the last day of the session, only about two dozen new laws had cleared both chambers. After the early Sunday vote on the budget, the final remaining piece of the state's fiscal puzzle was something known to lawmakers, and the lobbyists who keep them, as "the implementer."

The implementer, which triggers the budget on July 1, includes many things that were contained in the previous budget document. It can also have many other items in its thousands of lines of legalese. Those things have fur on them, usually, and that's why they are called rats.

This year, Sen. John Fonfara, D-Hartford, as the powerful co-chairman of the Finance Committee, wrote a few lines declaring that a street behind the Hartford Courant, closed because it's on the path of a controversial planned bus way, must remain open 20 hours a day. There's a guy who'll enjoy Courant endorsements for the foreseeable future.

So it's Wednesday and the House is droning for several hours on the implementer. Republicans, who pored over the 326-page document for two solid days, arguing over various items, winning small victories in negotiations with Democrats, finally let the bill go, so lawmakers could end the session on time.

Meanwhile, the Senate is into day three of multi-hour gushes of praise for departing lawmakers. From 1:45 until 4:22, the Senate "circle" commemorated retiring President Pro Tempore Don Williams, D-Brooklyn, and from 4:50 until 7:52, the celebration was for Senate Minority Leader John McKinney, R-Fairfield, who is seeking the GOP nomination for governor. Two prior days included multi-hour tributes to other departing senators. Gentle taxpayers will be relieved to know that there were no dislocated elbows from people patting themselves on the back.

That time period could have been spent by the majority pushing through a bill that would set up a review process for those prison inmates who as teenagers were convicted in adult court for violent crimes. The U.S. Supreme Court, knowing now that science shows that teenagers have under-developed brains, wants states to do this. But this is the second year Connecticut lawmakers failed. Democrats said that Republican amendments would have lengthened debate and brought up a series of get-tough-on-crime measures that have already been settled, but could be embarrassing in an election year.

That brings us back to April 21, when the bill could have been debated for as long as Republicans wanted to stand up and gab.

Anyway, as the final comments on the implementer echoed in the House, Senate Majority Leader Martin Looney, D-New Haven read a list of 73 bills that would become a consent calendar, which passed at 11:39. It's the longest consent calendar in Capitol memory.

The implementer got exactly three minutes of discussion before the 11:47 vote and the midnight deadline.